With YouTube allowing companies to purchase ads which play before many of the videos on the service begin airing, organizations have gotten creative with how to capture a viewer’s attention in as little as six seconds. The upcoming horror film The Nun exploited that brief advertising window by delivering users an ad that concludes with a demonic entity shrieking, startling many. YouTube has since removed the ad, though those of you brave enough can watch it above.
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As the abundance of ads on the service have numbed most users to ignore many of these ads, one Twitter user took it upon themselves to warn all of social media about the clues that a loud, horrifying noise was about to take over their screen.
WARNING! If you see an ad on youtube with the volume sign 🔊🔉🔇 being turned down and nothing else, ITS A JUMPSCARE for the new NUN movie coming out. i advise you look away and/or turn down the volume if you have anxiety or just straight up hate jumpscares, pls rt to save a life
— apple 🍎 (@bbydvas) August 12, 2018
The message advised, “WARNING! If you see an ad on youtube with the volume sign 🔊🔉🔇 being turned down and nothing else, ITS A JUMPSCARE for the new NUN movie coming out. i advise you look away and/or turn down the volume if you have anxiety or just straight up hate jumpscares, pls rt to save a life.”
The warning garnered more than 130,000 retweets, confirming just how many YouTube users found this advice helpful. Even YouTube noticed the warning and responded to the user, confirming, “Appreciate you bringing this to our attention! This ad violates our shocking content policy and it’s no longer running as an ad.”
According to the ad policy, YouTube aims “to avoid offending or shocking users with websites, or apps that are inappropriate for our ad network.” Elements of a video that can be deemed “shocking” falls down to “whether the video shows scenes containing violent and/or graphic imagery that can be shocking or disturbing to viewers” or “whether the violence contained in the video is realistic when posted in a dramatic context.”
In the film, “When a young nun at a cloistered abbey in Romania takes her own life, a priest with a haunted past and a novitiate on the threshold of her final vows are sent by the Vatican to investigate. Together they uncover the order’s unholy secret. Risking not only their lives but their faith and their very souls, they confront a malevolent force in the form of the same demonic nun that first terrorized audiences in The Conjuring 2, as the abbey becomes a horrific battleground between the living and the damned.”
The Nun is the latest entry in the shared universe of horror films kicked off by The Conjuring, with this ad being the first of what we can assume to be countless scares in the build-up to the film’s release
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The Nun hits theaters on September 7th.
Do you think this ad took things a little too far? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!
[H/T Variety]
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